


The Hatpin is Mightier

by QuailiTea



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: F/F, Feminist Themes, Hatpin Panic, Name Changes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2017-12-19
Packaged: 2019-02-17 04:14:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13068903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuailiTea/pseuds/QuailiTea
Summary: A small expansion of my own headcanon, as well as a repair to a particularly annoying continuity error. Why does Phryne call her Georgina Charlesworth, while everyone else calls her Regina?Happy Secret Santa to MercurialBianca!





	The Hatpin is Mightier

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MercurialBianca_TheHonorableMrsMcCarthy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercurialBianca_TheHonorableMrsMcCarthy/gifts).



Georgina Elizabeth Charlesworth was not going to stand for this. She was not going to put up with one more minute of that odious man’s _insinuations._ Of his creeping hands and not-so-subtle winking and lip-licking. Georgina had had enough. She all but slammed the cover open on her typewriter, intending to bash out a good-and-proper resignation letter that would really set Mr. Bradley’s hair, what was left of it, on fire. “I’ll find the address for Louisa Lawson,” she snarled, wrangling with a sheet of paper, “I’ll write to her myself and get a position at the Dawn and then Bawdy Bradley can go hang.” She punched the first few keys with force strong enough to hurt her knuckles, but by the time she got to the actual meat of the letter, she began to sigh. It was too long a shot. She had already tried a number of places, but the rejection letters, while polite, had been firm.

_We appreciate the verve of your application, but the number of lady journalists on our staff is sufficient to our needs. We commend your enthusiasm and will retain your information for a period of six months, should our staffing needs change through marriage or other adjustment of our female workforce._

Georgina leaned back in the creaking, decrepit chair and sighed again. Marriage wouldn’t be quite the concern for her that the newspapers might be thinking of it as, but one could hardly mention that in a job application. But ever since she’d met Sigrid, she’d been as reassured as anything of her confirmed ‘spinsterhood,’ such as it was. And now that the two of them were sharing a flat (Oh, that thought gave her such joyful butterflies), there was no way should could just quit her job without some other form of income lined up. Reluctantly, she released the sheet of paper from the carriage, and began to drop it into her wastepaper basket in minuscule, frustrated shreds.

“Bradley hassling you again?” The voice that came from over her shoulder belonged to a teenage boy, not much older than some of the students she had been used to teaching, one of the errand runners. “You want me to empty that before he comes snooping around?”

“Please,” she said. “I appreciate it, Rob.” The tousle-haired boy emptied the fragments of her resignation letter into his rubbish bag and moved on through the newsroom, tidying up as he went.

“Miss Olafsson is in the lobby,” he added over his shoulder as he worked. “I think she’s looking for you.”

“Oh, yes, thank you, I said I’d meet her for lunch since she has no classes today.” Georgina pushed her chair in, straightened her desk and slipped out of the newsroom with one eye still carefully on her boss’s office door, but Mr. Bradley never made an appearance. Outside, Siggy was waiting for her with a mischievous smile playing on her peach-tinted lips, the rest of her face and most of her blonde curls concealed under a violet velvet hat with an outrageous bunch of burgundy peonies and purple ribbons spilling around the brim. She looked so beautiful in jewel tones that Georgina hiccupped slightly when she saw her.

“New hat, love?” she asked, trying to hide her smile and failing utterly. Sigrid handed her a coat that was probably hers, and she pulled it on, nearly knocking her own hat sideways.

“I thought you’d like it!” Sigrid beamed, and the floral heap of extravagance wobbled dangerously. “Though I think I may have pinned the silly thing wrong. You’ll have to help me put it to rights at some point.” She winked broadly, her lips pursed. Nobody was around to see, so Georgina caught the blown kiss and mimed tucking it into her dress. “Now, take me out to tea like you promised, and we can discuss just why you look like a thunderstorm ready to break.” She jutted out her elbow and the two women promenaded out the door, letting the bang of the latch be all the farewell Bradley would get.

“He’s quibbling and nitpicking and innuendo-ing again,” Georgina explained with a sigh as they rounded the corner and made their way to the ladies’ tea room. Sigrid knew instantly who she meant. “Says I either need to cut my article down again to make room for my name, or else accept that someone else’s name will be listed instead.” She stretched gingerly as she strolled, feeling palpable relief the further they walked from the office. Holding still like a rabbit hiding from a fox was all well and good to try and keep Bradley’s hands from wandering, but it stiffened one up terribly. “Suggested that I could work my way around the whole thing if I ‘changed my name, darling thing, and I would be _happy_ to help you.’” She grimaced as she repeated his words.

“Your name? Marriage?” Sigrid squeezed Georgina’s hand tenderly as they were seated in the tea room and presented with menus. “What on earth could be his motivation?”

“Perversity,” she said. “He knows I’ve no interest in the male reporters, so he’s either testing me for interest in him, or wants me out. Even though, as it happens, my column is selling papers, so he’s cutting off his nose to spite his face.”

“Interest in him?” Sigrid’s expression flashed worry, and Georgina couldn’t help but smile.

“Don’t worry, Siggy, love,” she said. “Marrying him would probably mean giving up writing so I could cook a roast every night, and you know full well how that would turn out.” She did, in fact. Georgina’s last experiment with cooking a roast had resulted in shamefaced tears on her part, hysterical laughing tears on Siggy’s part, a large bowl of porridge for dinner, and a promise to never again put Georgina within spitting of the range without supervision. She had accepted her demotion to recipe-reader with good grace and a number of apologetic kisses. As their teas were poured and drunk, slowly the talk turned more mundane. Sigrid was still teaching at the school that Georgina had left not eight months ago, determined to get through to some of the more stubborn of the pupils that just because a piece of poetry wasn’t dirty, that didn’t mean it wasn’t interesting. She had not been having a great deal of luck.

“There’s always Chaucer, you know,” Georgina said between bites of sandwich. “Just keep an unexpurgated text in the classroom and have them read the tame bits at home.”

“That’s an idea, I suppose,” Sigrid said as she stirred her tea idly. “I’m certain it would intrigue them, but it only takes one complaint of lewdness to bring things crashing down.”

“So, what you’re saying is, you’d rather avoid lewdness and don’t want me to help you fix your hat?” Georgina smirked, and after a few moments, Siggy did too, with an accompanying hurried search for some coins to leave on the table. Arm in arm, they made their way the long way around back toward Georgina’s office, timing their arrival for the exit of the other female reporter, which would leave the Ladies’ assuredly unoccupied, and give them a few more minutes alone.

By the time Siggy’s hat had been adequately adjusted, the clatter in the office was loud enough to cover her giggling “George!” as the two women repaired their attire and makeup. Siggy left the Ladies’ first, after planting one more lingering kiss on her lover. Only after Siggy left did Georgina realize that she was still in possession of the hatpin that had been their entire pretext. Shrugging, she made her way back to her desk, only to feel her happy bubble burst when she saw Mr. Bradley ensconced in her chair, pecking idly at her typewriter and probably ruining the ribbon utterly. Usually, the sight of him sent a stab of anxiety straight through to her core. Georgina braced herself for the same as she watched him begin to turn around, but instead, she felt a sudden thrum of resolution at the same moment as an audacious idea presented itself. Siggy called her George – maybe she could call herself something else too. Georgina squared her shoulders and took one firm step into the office, then another, one hand clasped around the hatpin like a talisman against the man’s leering eye.

“Ahh, Georgina,” he said, and she almost felt the slime as his words washed over her. At the desk next to hers, Marvin Smith, the Farm and Animal Husbandry writer was pecking away, but gave her a sympathetic look. It was enough. “Now, dear girl, had you decided? I certainly don’t want to give your column to Smith here, but your byline, well, it just won’t squeeze in there.” On the word squeeze, Bradley drew the vowel out, flexing his hands in a way that usually made her flinch. But not right this moment.

“Mr. Bradley,” she began, and her voice was far clearer than she expected, because not only Smith, but also Whittaker, Mayfield and Finn all looked up curiously. “I have given it some thought. I know you feel that my best choice would be to shorten my name by changing it yours, but I’m afraid I’ll have to decline your generous and chivalrous proposal.” She drew closer, still toying with the hatpin, keeping her voice light. “It would be so deeply wounding to all of our much-vaunted integrity if someone were to attribute nepotistic reasons to my columns appearing in your magazine.” This was all joking, all humor – isn’t that the way he’d always phrased it? What a jape! And, in fact, there were several chuckles around the room as the men contemplated old Bradley trying to make it with the meticulous and utterly focused Miss Charlesworth. “But, I do respect your ethically thorny dilemma.” She came up to the desk, and without really thinking about it, began to gesture with the hatpin, brandishing the six-inch accessory with a rose on the end as if it were her old teaching pointer. “So, I have devised a solution. I will drop part of my first name and my middle initial.” She drew slashes through each letter on the column she had left on her desk, and he yanked his fingers back in sudden fear. Old pervert could dish it, but he couldn’t take it. “You can bill me as Regina Charlesworth, and that will be just as many letters as Ellsworth Whittaker and fewer than Alexander T. Bradley.” She tapped out the names with the pin onto the keys of her typewriter, and Bradley suddenly vacated her chair as she marched cheerfully around the desk, to more laughter. “It does have a certain music to it, don’t you boys think? Regina Charlesworth! Regina Charlesworth!” She addressed the room with the hatpin as a baton, and Mayfield gave a guffaw and slapped his desk.

“Cheers Reggie!” someone called. “Give her that Bradley, she’s got some sales to her name.” Bradley shuddered and blustered red, but the room wasn’t letting him go that easily.

“Oi! Cheers for Reggie!” “Reggie the dainty dynamiter!”

“Fine, fine, of course, it's a solution,” Bradley said. “But I want your column retyped with the new byline ASAP.” The last was delivered with a final flourish, as if he had made a grand concession, but as his office door banged shut, Georgina, now Regina, felt a surge of victory. Retyping was nothing, not after three weeks of researching that column and interviewing scientists about dynamite chemistry. She resolved, as she retook her chair to the applause of several of her fellow reporters, that perhaps, just possibly, she would be able to make it in the world of journalism after all. Smith, quietly, slipped her a smile as he stood.

“Don’t worry about it Reggie,” he said. “I’ll send word down to the printer with Rob. They’ll make a new byline in the type for you, and swap it out. He's being an old bear.”

“Thank you, Marvin,” she said, beaming. “If you like, I can type up your trichinosis in pigs column while you do that.” The man was the slowest typist she’d ever met, so the offer was met with a nod and a handshake. As she took his notes and rearranged her typewriter carriage, the happy bubble in her chest filled up again. She was buying Siggy another hat, she decided. Maybe in rose, to go with her lovely hatpin. And she would sign it “From George.” Just because.


End file.
